Opera isn't a half bad browser really. Not as good as firefox but still better than IE. It supports tabbed browsing, and is quite fast and low in demand on system resources. Probably the last of those is the big reason it was chosen.

having a web broswer would allow you to do so many things with your DS, email people, log onto your message boards anywhere and post, listen to music (if the sound worked with the browser) look at porn lol

I'm guessing they'll be putting in a pull up on screen keyboard to type? cuz the internet is kinda useless without being able to type